The world wide web (web) has become an important tool used throughout the world. One particular advantage of the web is that it allows users throughout the world to interact with one another via collaborative websites. Collaborative websites, such as wikis, allow anyone within an online community to edit content within a collaborative website. A wiki, in particular, is a software engine that may be used to create a collaborative website and/or power community websites, whereby users can easily create, edit, and/or link webpages within the wiki. Additionally, users may also create new content for the collaborative website and/or link to content within the collaborative website.
Collaborative websites can be searched using a search engine. Search engines typically use a web spider to parse data and then rank webpages based on how many search terms appear within a webpage and the proximity of the words within the webpage. The data is then presented in a list to users, where the webpages with the most similarity to the search term are listed first. However, while the results may include the search term, the results may not adequately represent the most relevant webpages within an online community. This is because the search engine ranks webpages according to a predefined algorithm, instead of allowing users to determine what webpages are most important. Additionally, the search engine displays the results over one or more pages, which often requires users to go through multiple pages of results before finding an important, or popular, webpage within the online community.
For example, a user searching for “pop” (i.e., a carbonated beverage) using a standard search engine will be presented with a number of webpages relating to “pop music”, whereas the user really was searching for “pop” as another way to refer to “soda”. Since all of the webpages display “pop music” as most relevant, the user will have to search through the webpages to eventually get to webpages about “soda”, if such webpages are even found by a traditional search engine. This is frustrating for users that may not know synonyms for their search terms, or have to search through multiple pages of irrelevant search results before finding a relevant webpage. This inability to find relevant webpages is particularly frustrating when navigating collaborative websites where users are supposed to be able to easily contribute to, and interact with, an online community.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.